iTunes 11 is a radical departure from previous versions and nothing illustrates this more than the new album display mode. The headlining feature of this display is the new view style that visually matches the track listing to the album’s cover art. The result is an attractive display of textual information that seamlessly integrates with the album’s artwork.

After using iTunes for a day I wondered just how hard it would be to mimic this functionality — use a source image to create a themed image/text display.

We use a similar technique for some of our apps at Shopify and it’s a great effect. This is one of those useful bits of source code sorcery that really ought to be used in a lot of places.